Tag: lyrics

Country music, sitting in a truck, sinking in its rivers.

This video, created by a music critic, was posted recently over at Gawker:

The creator, Grady Smith, explains that the video highlights how generic modern mainstream country music is.

I’m inclined to believe that all he’s really doing is highlighting how strong these themes are, symbolically, in country music. Complaining about country singers always talking about dirt roads and river bends is like complaining that hip-hop artists mention “the ‘hood” so often. The argument he could be making instead is that these symbols have become the content of the songs instead of being tools used to anchor the music in the genre while making more personal idiosyncratic statements, which is quite possibly what’s happening. Of course, even then you’d have to decide whether the narrative is even the point of the song or whether the song is just meant to be fun. That’s the case in a lot of Cajun music, for instance, where a song might consist almost completely of just the phrase, “Les haricots sont pas salés,” [The beans aren’t salty] because the point is to dance and the vocals are being utilized purely for their rhythmic potential.

Linguistic exoticism… and Van Damme.

So I’m sure everyone has seen Van Damme’s epic split by now:

Mainly, I walked away from this thinking, “Ya know, I actually really like that Enya song.”

It turns out Enya’s first language is Irish:

I spent quite some time trying to find and example of her speaking Irish that was at least of a slightly better quality than the video above but it doesn’t seem to exist. What’s more, her music is only occasionally sung in Irish. This is strange to me as New Age music places a premium on exotic otherworldly aesthetics which the use of a little known language would support. In fact, Enya once had an entirely new language created just for three songs off her album Amarantine.

So why not employ a language that she knows so well? Maybe she doesn’t like writing her own lyrics (as all of her songs in Irish seem to be written by her)? Maybe she doesn’t want the language to associate her too closely with Ireland? It’s hard to imagine that she’s not proud of her heritage, though, and if she cares at all about the survival of Irish she could help it out a ton by being known as a world-famous singer who uses Irish exclusively.

Why I love Why?

Because he/they keep putting out things like this:

I normally listen to music while studying but I always skip Why? because I constantly become distracted by the poetry of the lyrics. So deadpan that it’s easy to overlook the depth of what he’s saying. I might have to do some lengthy posts about what’s going on here linguistically someday, maybe when time expands to allow for extracurricular activities.

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